Member Advice on Learning a Language

When was the last time you described something as "smashing?" or took a slug from a bottle of drink, or bought a pair of brogues, or twigged to the meaning of something new? Well without realising it, you've been using words from the Scot's Gaelic (Gàidhlig) language which have been incorporated ... Read review

Makes great literature accessible, logical phonology, can now pronounce Scottish place names

Hard language to learn, limited usefulness as everyday language

"When was the last time you described something as "smashing?" or took a slug from a bottle of drink, or bought a pair of brogues, or twigged to the meaning of something new? Well without realising it, you've been using words from the Scot's Gaelic (Gàidhlig) language which have been incorporated into English. For example, the word "smashing" comes from the Gaelic " is math sin", meaning "that's good". Gàidhlig is now spoken by fewer than 60,000 native ..."
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"You can't deny the importance of languages - they impact our lives on a daily basis. And despite many preconceptions they're an incredibly useful and worthwhile thing to learn.
So how does one best go about learning a language? Well as somewhat of a language enthusiast I hope to be able to help with this casse-tête - of course there's no set answer - it's going to be different for everyone, but I can at least share my experiences of learning languages ..."
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"The less sophisticated of my forbears avoided foreigners at all costs, for the very good reason that, in their circles, speaking in tongues was commonly a prelude to snake handling. The more tolerant among us regarded foreign languages as a kind of speech impediment that could be overcome by willpower.
[Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941), U.S. author, columnist. The Worst Years of Our Lives,“Language Barrier” (1991; first published 1989).]
A ..."
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"Sorry folks but I’m going to do my standard ‘language teacher op’ thing here within this article (as per!) and try to implicitly convince you/encourage you to learn a language! You have been warned (ok?) but it’s a tough job and somebody’s gotta do it and I suppose I’ll do!
My mental framework for trying to persuade you to do all this comes from another typical day in the secondary school ‘language’ ..."
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"I'm absolutely surrounded by linguists in my family. My dad is a French teacher who also speaks Spanish, a little German and Italian and occasionally dabbles in Sanskrit (useful for philology - the study of language - as it's a very early Indo-European tongue). My mum has a degree in zoology, so has to keep up her Latin. My late grandpa picked up a fair smattering of Urdu when in India during the war, and it was from him that I obtained an (unintentionally) ..."
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